Halakhah for Americans By Elli Fischer • Friday, March 18, 2011 9
Comments E-mail Print Moshe Feinstein.

Asked in a 1975 New York Times interview how he had acquired his
standing as America's most trusted authority in Jewish religious law
(halakhah), Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986) replied: ''If people see
that one answer is good and another answer is good, gradually you will
be accepted.''  Relevant Links Rabbi Moses Feinstein  Norma Baumel Joseph,
Jewish Women’s Archive. Many of Feinstein’s rulings responded to and
profoundly affected the lives of women. (With an extensive bibliography
of secondary works.)  Responsa and the Art of Writing  Mark Washofsky,
An American Rabbinate. Occupying a middle ground between formalism and
realism, the legal writings of Moshe Feinstein are examples of intuitive
interpretation anchored in a literary text.  So That One May Live  Moshe
Feinstein, Moshe Tendler, JLaw. A summary translation and annotation
by Feinstein’s son-in-law of his 1977 authorization of surgery to
separate infant Siamese twins, sacrificing one.  Our Ethiopian Kin
Shmarya Rosenberg, Failed Messiah. In a 1984 responsum on the halakhic
status of Ethiopian Jews, Feinstein expresses anguish that some have
refused to embrace them because of their skin color.

This deceptively simple reply actually does help explain how a modest
sage who first set foot on American soil over the age of forty, spent
the last decades of his life on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and spoke
Yiddish almost exclusively became the pre-eminent address for halakhic
dilemmas that emerged specifically within the American context.

Born to a pedigreed rabbinic family in the Belarussian town of Uzda,
Feinstein was educated in the yeshivas of greater Lithuania before
accepting his first rabbinic post in 1916. Coming under increased pressure
from the Soviet regime, he emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1936
and soon accepted a position at a New York yeshiva, Mesivtha Tifereth
Jerusalem. There he remained until his death exactly 25 years ago (March
23, 1986).

Both during his life and since his death, Feinstein has remained
relatively unknown outside of the Orthodox community. There, however, his
reputation  is unassailable, based in part on his seven-volume commentary
on the Talmud (1946) but mostly on his magnum opus, Igrot Moshe ("Epistles
of Moses"): eight volumes of responses to queries from around the world
addressing a dizzying variety of modern halakhic dilemmas.

As with any great jurist, the nature and scope of Feinstein's rulings defy
neat categorization, though with the help of an ever-expanding secondary
literature it is possible to identify a number of themes and trends.

For one thing, throughout, Feinstein differentiated Orthodoxy from
other modern denominations, striving in particular to thicken the line
between it and its nearest relative, Conservative Judaism. To that
end, he elevated the requirement of mehitzah—the physical barrier
between sexes in the synagogue—to the level of a biblical injunction;
disqualified conversions and marriages solemnized by non-Orthodox rabbis;
and forbade Orthodox rabbis from participating with non-Orthodox rabbis
on communal or national boards. Although allowing some wiggle room in
conditions of economic duress—for example, permitting Orthodox teachers
to accept employment at Conservative institutions—his clear objective
was to protect the traditional Jewish way of life from influences that
in his view could lead to unbelief or non-observance.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that he was an extreme social
conservative or Luddite; on the contrary, his goal was to enable that
traditional way of life to function and indeed to flourish within
20th-century America. To that end, he steered an idiosyncratic path
between accommodation and rejection. Nowhere is this more evident than
in two consecutive responsa that deal with virtually identical (and,
for Sabbath-observant Jews, equally problematic) modern technologies:
microphones and hearing aids. In the first ruling, Feinstein writes that
it is "clearly forbidden" to speak into a microphone on the Sabbath,
enumerating four reasons for the prohibition. In the very next ruling,
mitigating several of the arguments in the previous one, he authorizes
those in need to use hearing aids on the Sabbath. Although he articulates
a legal rationale, it is clear that this formal justification is
constructed on an intuitive distinction between, on the one hand,
tinkering with synagogue ritual and, on the other hand, accommodating
and enabling the handicapped.

From this example alone, which could be multiplied a hundred-fold,
one can identify a central feature of Feinstein's approach: what might
be termed reluctant leniency. Although Jewish law has long recognized
categories other than "forbidden" and "permitted," Feinstein tended to
employ his particular yardstick in instances where leniency might be
construed as a concession to the American milieu. Thus, he reluctantly
permitted the consumption of government-certified milk (rather than only
milk that had been processed under stringent Jewish supervision), the
limited celebration of Thanksgiving, and riding in public transportation
even when this would result in contact with members of the opposite sex.

In addition to practicing reluctant leniency in connection with the
American environment, Feinstein strove to embrace disparate elements
within the Orthodox community itself. On, for example, the internally
divisive question of Zionism, he ruled that there was a mitzvah but no
obligation to live in the land of Israel, thereby validating without
mandating the Zionist impulse. When a group of men wished to split
from a synagogue that displayed American and Israeli flags adjacent to
the ark containing the Torah scrolls, he agreed that the display was
frivolous and that symbols of the secular state of Israel had no place
in a synagogue—but then instructed the group to remain anyway. In
brief, if his desire with respect to non-Orthodox forms of Judaism was
to create clear boundaries, within the Orthodox community it was to
maintain communal cohesiveness.

All of these positions testify in part to the exigencies of Feinstein's
historical moment. In postwar America, Orthodoxy was on the wane as
Conservative Judaism enjoyed a radical upsurge, earning the allegiance
of vast swaths of the emerging American-born, college-educated Jewish
upper-middle class. Feinstein's form of Orthodoxy, at once rigid and
lenient, outwardly secessionist and internally inclusive, was consciously
designed to stand in the breach. In contrast to other writers of responsa,
notably the encyclopedic Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, he tended to put forward
his own often unprecedented and even unsupported readings both of
social realities and of canonical texts, and these readings were often
teleological; not a philosopher or an ideologue, he had a clear vision
of what traditional Jewish life ought to look like, and he marshaled
prodigiously erudite arguments in its support.

At today's distance, and especially in light of the dramatic shift
in the respective fortunes of Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy, it has
become increasingly possible to assess the success or failure of
Feinstein's strategy. Within the Orthodox community itself, some of
his rulings—on mehitzah and conversion standards, for example—have
become institutionalized to the point where it is difficult to conceive
of an American Orthodoxy without them. Others, notably on the halakhic
definition of death—this and other life-and-death questions were another
area of his expertise—have become the subject of controversy. Still
other rulings, including, to a large extent, his strictures on dealings
with non-Orthodox Jews, are respectfully ignored. Above all, the increased
affluence and mobility of Orthodox American Jews, resulting in greater
internal variegation, have led to an incipient reconsideration of the
need to preserve Orthodox cohesiveness at all costs.

And yet, if the legacy of Feinstein's rulings is mixed, those
rulings continue to carry greater weight than those of any other
"American" halakhist. Among his successors—chiefly, two sons and one
son-in-law—none has managed to command the wall-to-wall trust of the
Orthodox community. Although America continues to have its share of
Torah scholars, no one but Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was able to draw a
subtle line between hearing aids and microphones—and get away with it.

Elli Fischer, who lives in Israel, is a writer and translator and blogs
at adderabbi.blogspot.com.